Asia's Space Race

National Motivations, Regional Rivalries, and International Risks

James Clay Moltz

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2011
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9780231527576
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In contrast to the close cooperation practiced among European states, space relations among Asian states have become increasingly tense. If current trends continue, the Asian civilian space competition could become a military race. To better understand these emerging dynamics, James Clay Moltz conducts the first in-depth policy analysis of Asia's fourteen leading space programs, concentrating especially on developments in China, Japan, India, and South Korea.

Moltz isolates the domestic motivations driving Asia's space actors, revisiting critical events such as China's 2007 antisatellite weapons test and manned flights, Japan's successful Kaguya lunar mission and Kibo module for the International Space Station (ISS), India's Chandrayaan lunar mission, and South Korea's astronaut visit to the ISS, along with plans to establish independent space-launch capability. He investigates these nations' divergent space goals and their tendency to focus on national solutions and self-reliance rather than regionwide cooperation and multilateral initiatives. He concludes with recommendations for improved intra-Asian space cooperation and regional conflict prevention.

Moltz also considers America's efforts to engage Asia's space programs in joint activities and the prospects for future U.S. space leadership. He extends his analysis to the relationship between space programs and economic development in Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, North Korea, Pakistan, the Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam, making this a key text for international relations and Asian studies scholars.

CHAPTER ONE

ASIAN SPACE DEVELOPMENTS

Motivations and Trends

Much has been written about the dynamics of the cold war in space, what journalist William Burrows calls the “first space age.”¹ The United States and the Soviet Union dominated space and spent billions on sophisticated military systems to monitor the Earth from orbit. Yet neither deployed significant, dedicated weapons in this new environment after an initial foray of nuclear weapons testing in space from 1958 to 1962, which rendered a number of their own orbiting satellites inoperable. Despite a series of Soviet antisatellite (ASAT) tests from 1968 to 1982 and one U.S. ASAT test in 1985, a surprising trend of strategic restraint in space prevailed throughout the cold war, thanks to the evolution of bilateral norms, treaties, and regularized contacts on space security matters.²

The second space age arguably began with the emergence of significant Chinese human spaceflight capabilities in October 2003. After the lull in space competition that followed the Soviet break-up in 1991, space once again became a competitive environment. It now promises to be the focus of increasing great-power attention in the twenty-first century, across the range of civilian and military activities. But the dynamics of today’s space competition differ from those of the U.S.-Soviet space race during the late twentieth century, given changes in the world and differences in the emerging actors and their relationship to space technology. This context includes some factors that favor greater competition and others that might support increased space cooperation.

First, the international system is now characterized by multiple great powers, not by bipolarity. This is a far cry from the us-versus-them world of the superpowers, whose leaders did not have to worry about the activities of third countries in space. Despite their political hostility to each other, these conditions made cold war space management and the development of consensual norms much simpler. The higher “transactions costs” required to craft and enforce multilateral agreements make space management today arguably much more difficult. This problem is exacerbated by the widely disparate perspectives on space security seen in Asia today, unlike the relative consensus that prevailed between Washington and Moscow in past decades and the high levels of agreement seen within modern Europe.

Second, and related, emerging military space threats are not linked to any arms-control process or some similarly iterated security negotiations among the critical actors that might promote mutual restraint. Instead, the bulk of new countries in space lack a history of participation in arms control and have had no such talks involving space security with their rivals. Most of those in Asia share several common characteristics, in that they are relative newcomers to military space activity, are still engaged in longstanding regional competitions, and have no history of discussing these sensitive matters with their neighbors (or with the more established space powers). Formal negotiations on space at the Conference on Disarmament (CD) in Geneva were blocked during the 1998–2008 period by a feud between the United States and China. Washington had other, higher priorities it sought to pursue at the CD, such as negotiating a Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty (FMCT), and did not view talks on space as either urgent or particularly desirable, given its interest in keeping its options open for possible space-based missile defenses. Beijing did not want to give up its ability to produce fissile material while it believed the United States was pursuing unilateral advantages in space. The U.S. position on the desirability of space security talks changed after the 2007 Chinese ASAT test and the 2008 election of President Barack Obama, and the Chinese government now supports FMCT negotiations. However, the promised initiation of CD talks on space has been blocked by Pakistan, because of its security concerns vis-à-vis its larger rival India. Thus, formal space security talks remain in abeyance, and gaps in the existing arms-control framework—that allow testing and deployment of kinetic space weapons, lasers, other directed-energy systems, and dual-capable missile defenses—continue to cloud the future of space security.

However, a third factor that sets today’s space context apart from the cold war is working in the other direction. Recent economic globalization has spread information, technology, and investment around the world in such a way that there are many more cooperative pressures affecting space activity than ever before. The typical space corporation is multinational (from satellite providers such as Intelsat to launch services providers such as International Launch Services), using technologies from more than one country and marketing their products and services worldwide. Even political rivals (such as the United States and China) now trade extensively, which provides an incentive for space cooperation, although little has yet occurred in the U.S.-Chinese space context since 1998. In addition, growing financial interdependence and international trade play an increasing role in state decision making, affecting not just moderate-sized countries but also the world’s previously greatest creditor, the United States. China’s possession of large denominations of U.S. debt and the two sides’ yearly buying and selling of half a trillion dollars of each other’s products make the two sides highly dependent on each other, in sharp contrast to the economic autonomy of the cold war superpowers. The tremendous economic value of these exchanges significantly raises the costs to both sides of any future space conflict.

Finally, a fourth merging (and positive) factor is that there is more widely spread scientific knowledge after fifty years of space activity about problems caused by the release of harmful debris and electromagnetic pulse radiation into the orbital environment.³ Despite China’s 2007 kinetic ASAT test, this factor—at least in theory—should promote greater international cooperation in trying to prevent collective damage to space. There has indeed been some progress in this direction, such as the passage of a set of Orbital Debris Mitigation Guidelines at the United Nations in December 2007. The problem is that these guidelines lack an enforcement mechanism and remain voluntary. At the same time, the dramatic increase of the value of space activity to the societies, economies, and militaries of the world in recent decades suggests that self-interest alone should promote future restraint, at least among major spacefaring countries.

Asia’s place in this emerging set of space-related challenges is significant. Besides the United States, Russia, and the countries that make up the European Space Agency, almost all of the most rapidly developing space programs are located in the region. China, India, Japan, and South Korea are leading Asia into space, but countries such as Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, North Korea, Pakistan, the Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam all have significant space plans of their own. For this reason, understanding the dynamics within and among Asia’s emerging space programs is critical to coming to terms with the second space age.

The rest of this chapter first takes a brief look at lessons from the cold war in space to set a foundation for possible Asian learning from this experience. It then turns to the problem of understanding the new challenges we face in moving from bipolarity to multipolarity while adding new actors with unresolved histories of hostile relations (and without the rapprochement seen, for example, in the post-1945 Franco-German case). The chapter next considers some of the motivations of Asian actors in pursuing space capabilities and their greater options as “second-generation” states in space. Finally, it attempts to place Asia’s twenty-first-century space competition into the context of broader trends in Asia’s emerging international relations. Current predictions are generally pessimistic about hopes for collective management. These arguments, however, set out a challenge to national decision makers and provide a rationale for studying the individual histories and perspectives of the various Asian space programs, which are analyzed in chapters 2 to 6.

LESSONS OF THE COLD WAR IN SPACE

Space relations among Asian countries today differ significantly from the norms of the cold war in space. Despite hostile political relations between Moscow and Washington, the cold war witnessed the emergence of a regularized set of interactions aimed at managing the possible harmful effects of space competition, especially in the military arena. In fact, a culture of “managing” space activities began early on in the cold war context, with space’s inclusion in the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963 (which halted U.S. and Soviet nuclear testing in space), the negotiation of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty (which banned weapons of mass destruction [WMD] from orbit, demilitarized the Moon, and forbade the claiming of territory on any celestial body), and in the arms-control negotiations leading up to the 1972 Strategic Arms Limitations Treaty and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. These latter two agreements formalized an existing de facto U.S.-Soviet norm banning interference with each other’s treaty-verification and other information-gathering satellites and went further to codify a prohibition on the development, testing, or deployment of space-based ballistic-missile defenses. While a post–cold war U.S. decision terminated the ABM Treaty in 2002, the agreement served during the early 1970s to prevent a worsening of the U.S.-Soviet technological arms race, which very likely would have developed an active space-based component as well. Additional U.S.-Soviet leadership helped forge supporting international norms and legal requirements in civil space: the 1968 Rescue and Return Agreement for astronauts in distress, the 1972 Convention on International Liability for Damage Caused by Space Objects, and the 1975 Convention on the Registration of Objects Launched into Outer Space. Subsequent U.S.-Soviet cooperation in the Apollo-Soyuz project in July 1975 and engagement (albeit without success) in discussions aimed at banning ASAT weapons in the late 1970s provided ongoing contacts over space security. But détente relations were not a prerequisite. Space security negotiations continued even during the height of U.S.-Soviet political disputes during the Reagan administration in the early to mid-1980s, because of the perceived risks involved of not talking about space.⁴ Thus, while hostile relations continued relatively unabated throughout the cold war, a norm of managing space bilaterally emerged. Regular contacts and exchanges regarding critical issues of concern remained the rule rather than exception. Such communications, contacts, and norms of consultation have been almost wholly absent from Asian space relations. As each country accelerates its military space program, the absence of such conflict-prevention mechanisms for space could become a serious problem.

In sum, the benefits of long-term communication regarding space between the two capitals allowed the formation of both a series of formal and informal agreements over time in space that created at least a limited framework for stability. Since the two states feared the possible spillover of space conflict into general war, they decided to form preventive measures to avoid destabilizing deployments in space and to create networks for reliable communications and periodic cooperation. Since the end of the cold war, the United States and the Russian Federation—which are still the world’s two most capable space programs—have cooperated significantly in the area of space technology. Russian engines power American Atlas rockets for launching U.S. military payloads, and Russian Soyuz spacecraft routinely deliver American astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS). But this culture has not been adopted by the latecomers in Asia, for a number of geostrategic, economic, and political reasons. This lack of Asian cooperation in space security—and in other areas of space activity as well—poses a risk of future failure in space conflict avoidance and crisis management. Indeed, disputes over space activity could quickly spill over into military disputes and put space itself at risk if countries react hastily in a crisis and lash out against the space assets of one of their rivals or those of an outside power, possibly creating dangerous orbital debris or—in a nuclear scenario—disabling perhaps hundreds of spacecraft with electromagnetic pulse radiation.

Historically, the political hostilities spurred during technological races have often led to an increased risk of conflict, as countries fail to consider alternative courses of action and feel “forced” to react to the behavior (or predicted behavior) of others in the race.⁵ As the military analyst and China expert Larry Wortzel observes: “Whether one is a proponent of arms control agreements or not, the dialogue between the U.S. and the Soviet Union over arms control and treaties produced a body of mutual understanding that holds up today.”⁶ Norms and rules emerged from this process that ruled out extending sovereignty into space and allowed safe passage of each other’s satellites. However, Wortzel points out, “No such dialogue has taken place with China.”⁷ To date, both sides are to blame: the United States pursued a strategy of unilateralism regarding space security for a decade, and China has to date rebuffed direct military-to-military talks on space. Increasingly, experts on both sides identify the lack of such a dialogue as a worrisome problem. Whether the Obama administration’s recent openness to dialogue on space security at the UN CD will help to solve this problem remains to be seen. It may be fruitless if the People’s Liberation Army is not involved or is not open to potential limits on its space behavior. High-level political buy-in on both sides will be required for new understandings and new norms to be reached.

OLD THINKING IN A NEW INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM

In the U.S. debate on the future of space, many commentators, officials, and members of Congress alike have since 2007 simply inserted China into the Soviet Union’s old slot and returned to viewing space from a more or less cold war perspective.⁸ But this mode of thinking may be based on false assumptions that are distorting the U.S. understanding of current dynamics in space. Moreover, China—as will be discussed in chapter 3—is not the Soviet Union and instead has unique political, economic, and security interests that must be understood and taken into account. A related problem is that the United States has been used to seeing itself as the center of attention for all other nations since 1991. Without question, during the cold war, Moscow and Washington watched each other’s every move carefully and tended to react to each other’s programs in a more or less symmetric fashion. Today, however, the new players in space have considerably less capability to match the United States mission for mission or technology for technology. The world is also multipolar in structure, and they have other regional actors to worry about who may be more important to them, in terms of their national goals and interests, than Washington.

China, for one, is very sensitive to developments in Asia. While China may be competing with the United States in space, it is equally interested in its relative place with respect to its Asian neighbors. Moreover, when China sprints forward in its space activity, there is no question that India, Japan, and South Korea all feel challenged and want to react. China’s manned spaceflights and military tests have caused significa...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. Asia’s New Presence in Space
• Chapter 1. Asian Space Developments: Motivations and Trends
• Chapter 2. The Japanese Space Program: Moving Toward “Normalcy”
• Chapter 3. The Chinese Space Program: From Turbulent Past to Promising Future
• Chapter 4. The Indian Space Program: Rising to a Challenge
• Chapter 5. The South Korean Space Program: Emerging from Dependency
• Chapter 6. Emerging Asian Space Programs: Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, North Korea, Pakistan, the Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam
• Chapter 7. Asia’s Space Race: Implications for Regional and Global Policy
• Notes
• Index